Racial Discrimination

I was watching the news, when the footage of the Hurricane Katrina disaster came on. The news reporters were showing a black man walking in flooded waters near a market with a bag full of food and labeled him a “thief”. Social media in the United States has portrayed people of different racial backgrounds differently and unequally in recent years. In the essays “Theories and Constructs of Race” and “Loot or Find: Fact or Frame?” the authors discuss in both essays about issues with racial equality in our world today. Authors Linda Holtzman and Leon Sharpe discuss in the first essay racial schemes are created through prejudices and the telling and retelling of stories. While, authors Cheryl I. Harris and Devon W. Carbado discuss in their essay about the issue of “colorblindness” in social media. Holtzman is a professor of communications and journalism at Webster University, while Sharpe is a professor at Webster as well. Similarly, Harris and Carbado are professors at UCLA’s School of Law and have addressed widely on race, gender, civil rights and constitutional issues. Both essays do a good job at explaining their ideas and supporting them with evidence of racial discrimination in our world today. The authors from both essays organize their ideas and summarize them, which helps understand the main idea of racism, discrimination and racial inequalities in today’s society.

Decades of failed public and private remedies for chronic disparities and disadvantages in communities of color invite us to reexamine systems and institutions that provide and restrict opportunity in new ways (Lawrence, K., 2011). The causes seem to be intertwined being poor equals, equals a poor education, equals lack of employment, and ultimately equals an increased rate of crime.

Racial discrimination is the main and ongoing problem in the social life of Americans. When we look at the gap of incomes between White and African Americans, we can see the inequality between these two groups. In general, whites have more annual earnings than their black counterparts in America. Lori Ann Campbell and Robert L. Kaufman emphasized that the wealth determinants, which are the indicators of socio-economic status, have effected more on Whites than Blacks. And even when society is organized, there is still some disparities on account of race and ethnicity. (Campbell and Kaufman, 2006). And income disparities between African and White Americans have definitely effected the peace of the social life. According to Campell and

The system has also privatized the school and prison system, which go hand in hand with the economic reality of today. The racial disparities of today, was triggered by the downfall of the economic system that is in place right now. Families are struggling and individuals are looking for a way out. This paper will identify the realities African Americans face with the issue of economic justice along in the United States.

Even though black people have descendants who suffered much more inequality issues than they have faced nowadays, they still have to deal with this historical problem in different ways. The wealth gap between whites and blacks is huge, “every extra dollar of income earned by whites generates $5.19 in new wealth over 25 years while another dollar of income for a black family adds a mere 69 cents to its bottom line (Starkman)”. These numbers show us that we still live in a segregated

“Some employers used tests for hiring or promotion that screened out African American at a higher rate than white applicants, making it nearly impossible for them to be hired in any substantial numbers” (Vertreace, 2010). In many cases white supervisors or managers would make sure they interview just enough minorities so they want to appear not to be bias toward other races. They even pretend to follow company’s rules, but instead they make their own rules and dare someone to cross them. Nevertheless, there are not enough opportunities for black people to advance. If the only available jobs are low-income jobs, then the chance of living in poverty will continue for minorities.

African Americans have been systematically discriminated against since the advent of slavery over 200 years ago and still continue to be oppressed. Slavery created the ideology that Whites were superior to African Americans, because slaves were seen as property and not as human beings (O’Connell 2012). Following this sentiment, African Americans were not allowed to receive an education, let alone learn how to read. These slaves were dependent on their slave owners for the total well being of themselves, as well as their families. This dependency has created a cycle of poverty that has spiraled into the 21st century, affecting heavily populated areas of minority communities. While there is poverty among all Americans, Black Americans suffer from poverty rates highly disproportionate to White Americans (O’Connell 2012).

The socioeconomic gap that exists between white and black Americans is a topic that no one seems to know how to solve. In previous years it was easy to collectively point to one factor that caused this gap but in more recent times it has became a point of discussion and disagreement in the black community. The debate rests in the question of whether or not the socioeconomic gap between blacks and their white counterparts is a result of blacks being lazy or it is because of structural discrimination that are embedded in the laws and policies of the United States. The general consensus is that it is a mixture of the two explanations. People differ on how many of each explanation contributes to the problem and in turn they disagree on what the solution should be.

In a 2015 article written by the New York Times, it was seen in the census data that in 2013, black children were almost four times more likely to live in poverty than their white counterparts. According to the data, 38.3% of black children lived in poverty, as opposed to only 10.7% of white children. However, researchers did not investigate into the reasons why this trend was seen. After taking this sociology class and other ethnic studies classes, I have drawn on the Minority Status and Socioeconomic Standing section of this class, as well as relating this issue to the theory of job stratification in the United States. I conclude that three of the reasons that there are more poor black children than poor white children is because of the differences

In many academic sources, due attention is paid to the study of historical facts about wealth distribution. I think it is necessary to consider these facts in order to assess the current situation in the country. As mentioned by Dalton Conley, “black people seem to have gained little that would encourage them to maintain a realistic belief in the American Dream” (262). The growth of wealth gap should be considered while making conclusions on the link between the American Dream and racial issues. I agree with the fact that African Americans and whites have different opportunities. There are many examples which show the acts of racial discrimination in employment. I believe that the psychological effects of the history of slavery contribute

Racial bias is still a very active issue in society today. This paper explores the understanding of racial bias in business hiring. This is critical because racial bias continually uniforms businesses in hiring decisions. The prevalence of racial bias in business hiring, potential interventions, and explanations of why this occurs will be explored. How prevalent is racial bias in business hiring today and how can it be mediated?

In the United States wealth disparity, has affected different race of people, for example blacks, leading experts the field of sociology, in their opinion that black people are at a disadvantage in comparison to other ethical groups such as whites in wealth distribution, there are several social issues that creates this disparity. In the article written by Kellen Stanfield, (2011), p. 350 Persistent Racial Disparity, Wealth and the Economic Surplus as the for Reparations in the United States, states that “Even after the exclusion from wealth accumulation due to slavery ended, “segregation blocked access to education, decent jobs, and livable wages among the grandparents and parents of blacks born before the late 1960s, effectively preventing

Over the years, race and segregation in America have mattered. From my perspective, it is considered one of the most concern sociological topics as it plays a great deal among our society. Garner and Hancock discussed how Wilson pulled threads of theory and research together so to inform with reader that racism, segregation, as well as joblessness had formed a cruel looking-glass for the urban poor. Not to mention Wilson’s looking-glass; it showed us “the mirrored self within the big historical and global framework of racism and capitalism” (2014:208). Wilson (1996) described how work literally had vanished in the communities from the 1960s to the 1970s; thousands of black people, especially black men, suddenly found themselves jobless. Furthermore, Wilson examined the economic forces were the primary social structural variables, including institutional racism against African American people by using the empirical evidence; and that brought the underclass into existence. According to Wilson, the discriminatory federal housing policies trapped the black people in the inner cities; in other words, they got to move and live

Throughout America’s past, racial inequality has been a reoccurring theme in our society. Ever since the Europeans invaded America the white man has been superior compared to all ethnicities. No more than two hundred years ago, African Americans were slaves and only counted as three fifths of a person. Within the past hundred years African Americans have managed to obtain more equality in some situations, but in other cases racial inequality has become worse than it was when segregation took place. The gaps between the quality of education of white and black students receive appears to be growing instead of shrinking. The lack of quality education blacks receive has contributed to significant health differences between

Do Americans feel like there is still racial discrimination in today's everyday life? Racial discrimination is treating someone differently because of the color of his or her skin. Racial discrimination has been around for a long time. There are laws that are supposed to protect non whites from being racially discriminated against but these laws are not applied to everyone equally. There are a lot of different types of discrimination such as gender and age but the main type is racial. Racial discrimination still exist in America based on discrimination at work, police brutality, and arrest rates.